Thoughts on Leadership and Followership
Norb Mayrhofer Biography
General Manager, North American Commercial Products, Procter & Gamble
Norb Mayrhofer - Interview - Procter & Gamble
October 05, 2004     4 min. 32 sec.     Mayerhofer11_leadership    
Appreciate this clip:  

  • Share

Podcast: No podcasts are currently affiliated with this speaker

Loading...

Transcript
So leadership is all about people. It's all about helping people, and doing your part to help people around you understand. And help them - and help them work together to some sort of a common goal. I personally think that leadership and followership are very closely linked. I think that they have the characteristics of a really good leader. And the characteristics of a really good follower are very, very comparable. And what I try to bring to my organization is that we are all leaders and followers. So depending on the circumstance, what we want ideally, is we want the person who is best able to lead at that time, to lead. And that - sometimes it's me. Sometimes it's somebody else. And we want the organization to recognize when those moments are. And we want the followers to be able to be in the right kind of supportive mode. So to talk specifically about leadership, what I would - the way I think about it is, is what a good leader is, a really good leader, is a person who is - has the right kind of characteristics. Trust is a huge factor. If you trust them, the burden of - and you have to be careful because you can abuse this too. But the burden of proof on the detail tends to go way down. So if you don't trust, what you tend to want is proof. Lots of proof. More and more proof, which from an organization standpoint can really kind of bog you down. Now a certain amount of proof is important is important. It's required. So a leader has got to be trustworthy. The other thing I think a leader has to be is pretty humble. Because I don't think that you can be a good leader, and really just assume that you know everything that there is to know. That is just a personal perspective. Maybe there are folks that can do that. I can't. There isn't a day that goes by that I don't pick something up, and I say but I didn't know that yesterday. I could apply that to whatever it is that I'm doing. My personal experience has been that the organization feeds off of that. Because it gets them to feel involved. You know, I want to reach out to them, and bring them into the game. I want to - you know, we don't have a lot of redundancy in our systems. You know, I don't have any one job that has two people in it. Which means that if an individual isn't doing their job, and doing it with their head as well as with their heart then it's probably not going to get done very well. As a leader you want to create an environment then. So you want to set the direction. But you also want to have an environment where people are - they understand what's required of them. They are appropriately happy and engaged to get that work done. And where they feel like they matter. And they don't just matter as somebody that is moving papers from one box to the other. But they matter as people, as parents, as brothers and sisters, members of community. And that what they are doing contributes at least in part to them having you know, success in those areas as well. And then the last thing I think you have to be is, you have to be aware. You have to set up not just personal sensing systems, but you have broad sensing systems so that you're able to understand what's working and what's not. Where barriers kind of arise that need to be dealt with. I personally come at this from a - I spark to the idea of servant leadership. My job is to make my people successful. And to do anything that I can do in order - you know, ethically and legally in order to make them successful. So we constantly are asking them about, do you have what you need? You know, we get agreement on the objectives. We get agreement on the strategy and the direction. We set people off into their own teams, and they go do their job. My job is to not check up on them to see whether they are working hard or not. My job is to check up on them to see that we are delivering the right kind of resources, the right kind of direction, and the right kind of help that they need in order to be successful. And you know, nobody comes to work in the morning thinking, how can I screw this place up? People want to be successful. It's a human need I think, to take the creative gifts that you have, and apply them in meaningful ways to some positive outcome. We just happen to do it in a business environment setting. And I really do believe that we improve the lives of the world's consumers while we do it. But you know, we also improve the lives of our employees. We improve our communities. We do all those things by being successful. And I think leadership plays a big role in all of that.

Loading...